This book focuses for the first time on the Odyssey’s reception in late antiquity, the period that witnesses the transformation of classical culture into the world of the middle ages.

This book considers the ways in which medieval and, later, humanist geography absorbed and reinvented classical spatial models in order to address key questions of historical change, migration, and emerging national, regional, and linguistic identities.

Rubens’s Decius Mus Cycle is in many ways a first. It provides the earliest example of work for the medium of tapestry, and so illustrates the artist’s approach to the challenges presented by a narrative sequence of images.